Denial is a fool
by scelerus animus
Summary: Raito is equally stubborn and intelligent, so when his intelligence fails, what remains? 'You lost,' L says candidly, calmly, as if it's nothing significant that Raito, Kira, stands motionlessly before him, stunned into a mindless stupor. [RaitoL,Spoilers


Author Notes: Wow, I didn't realize how fast the DN fandom was growing. Well, here's one of the first DN fics I ever wrote, probably about a year ago. I never bothered to post it here, because... well, basically because I'm lazy.

Actually, I have a lot of fics, including DN ones, that I should post. Oh well. Hope you enjoy!

**disclaimer:** wow, if only I owned Death Note...

**theme:** written for 30angsts t_heme #20 Violence; War (marriage of death) _at livejournal.

**pairing/characters:** L/Raito-ness

**warnings/notes:** SPOILERS for entire series. shoune-ai/yaoi-ness, some language

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**Denial is a Fool**  
by scelerus animus

– o –

Before him lies a void of bland grayness and though there is no one else to see him, Raito stifles the self-righteous scream that burns in his throat, feral and clawing like a demon that hungers to be released.

Even in death Raito tries to masquerade as the intelligent but guiltless son of a respected police detective_ (no matter that, however indirectly, he killed his father as if he had been a speck of dust tarnishing the lush furnishings of his Utopia and then promptly moved on to more eminent matters)_.

Although it doesn't matter, Raito disdainfully thinks with a scowl twisting his fair features, since his glorious Utopia has been selfishly shattered by those ignorant bastards, and now he is Dead.

_Dead_. With a capital fucking _D_.

And all that graciously greets him in the afterlife is this endless, pitiful abyss of the most dismal, tasteless gray that is certainly not fit for the likes of him—_Kira, God_—by any means. It is utterly dull and mind-numbingly vast, like an itchy gray blanket dragged tightly over the eyes and mouth, suffocating.

Again, Raito suppresses that murderous scream that passionately tears at his throat, teeth grinding like wheels screeching against train tracks, metal white hot, sparks flying. Then he clenches his fists, perfectly trimmed nails digging sorely into his palms, and stiffly walks.

As his nails create crude crescent moons in his palms, his rage dulls any pain that trembles in his bones as if the demon is now rattling at his ribcage as it searches rapaciously for an exit, causing Raito's skin to become taut and pasty white _(although that might be attributed to fact that he is dead, but Raito is as tenacious as he is intelligent). _

There is no destination in mind, but there is fury and determination, predatory beasts that snap their ravenous raptor jaws and flash madly in Raito's fiery brown eyes. So Raito strides with a spine so rigid it might snap—_the cage bars shattering and the shrapnel splinters driving deeper into the crevices of Raito's fury blind mind__—_any minute through the infinite abyss of gray that is so putridly abominable to him.

Even in death, Raito refuses to admit defeat.

Soon enough, there is something that glimmers in the distance, a spot of discoloration in this infuriating grayness that blurrily phases in and out of view, but Raito single-mindedly knows it is there, so he continues boldly towards it _(because he also adamantly refuses to lose his last semblance of composure and run toward it, dammit)_.

When Raito is a few yards away and is able to discern the murky oval figure, he abruptly freezes, shock tumultuously flowing over him in icy waves that also seem to course through his boiling blood, transforming his veins to ice, fracturing, breaking under pressure _(though, honestly, none of it is possible because he's dead, isn't he?). _

"You lost," L says candidly, calmly, as if it is no actual surprise, nothing significant to him that Raito—_Kira_—stands motionlessly before him, stunned into wordless stupor, eyes wide, mouth gaping uselessly like one of those pretty koi fish that L had liked to feed in one of their numerous hotel rooms long past.

Some detached part of Raito's mind notes that L looks the same, hair in dreadful disarray, frame still grossly anorexic-thin, wrist bones jutting out against skin sickly pallid with lack of sunlight. And his eyes, inhumanly large eyes darkly accentuated by sleep-deprivation, only more so in death, gaunt and skeleton-like, as if hollowed out.

_(it fits him, the detached part of Raito's mind deems scathingly, but it doesn't take in account__—__or maybe blatantly ignores__—__that Raito may look that way himself, as he is as Dead as L) _

Crouched in that awkward, ridiculous position for which he was renown, with a half-eaten piece of strawberry cheesecake on a plain white plate before him, L nonchalantly takes another bite of swirly pink dessert, crumbs tumbling down his wrinkled white t-shirt and rumpled jeans. After thoughtfully looking at another bite he has gathered on his fork held by two long spindly fingers, he almost reluctantly holds it out to Raito, who still resembles a mindless koi.

"Would you like some, Yagami-kun?" he inquires politely, death-rimmed eyes staring innocently at Raito, an innocuous smile tugging at his lips.

In the moment, something furiously snaps in Raito as it had in the warehouse with Near, a devastating crack of a desperate mind, the oncoming of a tumultuous earthquake, and he suddenly lunges at L with an enraged roar, the last coherent thought ringing in his head like some voracious beast: _That fucking bastard__…_

As cheesecake and silverware scatter everywhere, he aims for L's face—_those damned cunning eyes and that deliberate, mocking smile_—amd his _(skeletal) _hands collide into L's nose and across his face, leaving a lurid trail of blood from the raw crescent marks in his palms, as Raito furiously grabs at that greasy black hair and ruthlessly slams L's head against the invisible barrier on which they somehow stand in this perpetual gray.

As he mercilessly smashes L's head against the invisible plane again and again, all that madly flitters through Raito's mind like the deafening buzz of a mass of incensed bees is that L is the bastard that started it all, it was all this fucking bastard's fault, with his grungy clothes that are never neat and clean, stringy black hair that never seems to be washed, and his large creep eyes that cunningly gleam with brilliance even while darkly rimmed with sleeplessness _(death)_,like some kind of retarded panda.

Mello and Near were simply trained and bred to be copies of this filthy, disgraceful bastard, the _original_ L, who had started it all, thoughtlessly ruined Raito's—_Kira's_—creation of a new, perfect world, liberated from crime and corruption, his own marvelous Utopia over which he would have reigned as the new _God_.

If not from him. _L._

"Fucking bastard," Raito hisses spitefully, narrowed eyes blindly spitting fire, mind overtaken by a blazing haze of red, and as thus, when he tries to bash L's head a third time he naturally doesn't see the vicious kick that L nimbly sends at his jaw.

Like a vibrant of shower of fireworks that falls on him, sizzling and blistering against his flesh, pain bursts in his head, and he stumbles several feet back, arms whirling frenziedly, arcing pinwheels that lead him nowhere and only make him feel disgustingly foolish _(after all, he falls alone, as there is no chain that connects them now__—__at least not one that can be seen)_.

With harsh, ragged gasps that are unnecessary but instinctive, Raito clumsily fumbles to sit up _(which is certainly unusual but rage makes the most dignified men graceless and despite that Raito is loathe to admit it, he has been proven to be only human, not God) _while L is already composed, albeit in his maladroit, hunched over manner, and gazing at his squashed cheesecake mournfully.

Glowering even more contemptuously at the unperturbed detective, Raito begins to speak, coughs harshly, and forgetting all propriety he might have retained, spits out a mouthful of saliva colored with a red tinge of blood.

_(funny how the dead could bleed and feel pain for no reason other than to taunt them with remembrance of their mortal life)_

Oddly, it doesn't spatter and settle on the indistinguishable surface on which Raito and L rest but instead continually plunges into the monochrome oblivion, a pellucid reddish blotch that soon disappears from sight, as if descending into a fathomless chasm.

Briefly L's dark eyes idly follow polychrome spit, before they swiftly return to gazing dolefully at his forlorn dessert, as if the incident was a common phenomenon.

Apparently deciding that it doesn't mattered that his cheesecake is scattered everywhere _(germs, Raito supposes resentfully, are inconsequential to the dead), _L carefully picks up the strewn fork and takes another bite from a bigger chunk of the strawberry cheesecake, smiling with decided bliss as he contentedly chews.

"You didn't have to refuse so aggressively, Yagami-kun," L says casually, another bite of white cream and pink swirls balancing on his fork.

Raito wants to throttle him immensely, grasp that pallid, scrawny neck in his hands, feel those arteries pumping, beating fiercer with exertion as the dead detective's airways are crushed between his fingers, vertebrae splintering, crunching in sharp pieces of grisly bone; nevertheless, his mind has cooled even if his rage hasn't calmed, and Raito knows it would be pointless.

L is already dead.

And so is Raito.

_(Kira is dead; God is dead)_

"You're bleeding, Yamagi-kun," L states in that same faux civil tone, rolling Raito's name across his tongue along with another piece of cheesecake, as if completely impervious to the fact that there is a fingerprint smear of blood across his face from when Raito attacked him, and thin trickles of dark crimson languidly slide down his sallow cheeks like an unsightly blemish.

Raito doesn't bother to contain the disgust that nearly rivals his hate.

When alive, Raito was appalled by L's insipid mannerisms, his blatant lack of any sort of decorum or taste and had been even more so dismayed to discover this was supposedly the world renowned detective L; unfortunately, Raito was fascinated with his sheer genius nonetheless, snarled into the thrilling mind games between Kira and L, a fight of genius that his pride will not let go even now.

Of course, at the time, both contradictory sentiments were skillfully concealed behind a facade of amiable morality, easily fooling everybody except for one.

L was—_is_—not the perfect parallel to Kira by sheer luck after all.

Consequently it is not illogical that L should be here to haunt him in his death. That would mean, however, Raito would have to accept his irrefutable defeat _(to L, whispers a cruel voice at the back of his head)_ and that was something he obstinately would not—_could not_—do.

Instead, glaring toxic knives from his eyes, muddy swirls of fuming hatred, Raito wipes his mouth, garish crimson blood streaking foully across his death-whitened skin, and bitingly asks, "What are you doing here, _L_?"

Raito calls him L purposely, and neither Ryuuga nor Ryuuzaki, two names a part of a persona that is meaningless now, swept away like the tide with the ever-changing moon. He has acquiesced in the sense that all pretenses have been torn and stripped away to reveal another more complex layer of the battle they inexorably wage, like an irksome splinter piercing through feverish flesh.

Presently, Raito has neither the envy nor the patience to deal with the duplicitous masquerade which he and L slyly paraded for the rest of the living world, or the mind games, battles of wit and intellect, that were the core of the war which they fought in the world of the living, and Raito knows L can detect this.

After all, Raito sourly reflects, he and L are—

"We are very much alike, Yamagi-kun," L states, unknowingly—_or knowingly, Raito irritably wonders_—finishing Raito's silent ruminations, and he smiles almost sadly at his remaining shambles of cheesecake.

L persists in calling him _Yagami-kun_ with that grating tone of pseudo-chivalry, outlandish panda eyes blinking guilelessly at him, and Raito knows it is a taunt, a trap. One into which he also knows he is falling.

_(after all, egotism and passion tend to blind and guide Raito's decision when it comes down to the crucial moments) _

The fork dangles limply between L's skeleton _(even more so than Raito's) _fingers, and Raito is faintly vexed, if not unsurprised, to find this normally trivial action abnormal, because he knows—_remembers_—even after these many years that L always likes to keep his fingers occupied, moving, whether rapidly typing across the keyboard of a computer, or eating his beloved sweets, or drinking sugar-cube-saturated tea, or gnawing on his damned thumb.

Blood lazily drips from both of them, a soundless crimson rain that oozes into the infinite vacant gray below, and rhythmic pain throbs against both of their temples. All the same, it doesn't matter because neither effect has any useful purpose _(except for revisiting unwanted memories) _for the dead, and L and Raito are all too dead.

"Are we?" reiterates Raito with a touch of scorn coupled with bitter resignation that leaves an acidic taste on his tongue, like those sour candies that L never liked—_likes_—to eat.

L absently nods and resumes his glutinous desert-eating. As if able to mold it, his bare feet clasp the unseen surface in that apelike style which Raito always finds abhorrently animalistic and plebian at the same time.

Black-rimmed eyes _(so fucking like Death, Raito thinks and mentally snorts) _once more survey Raito steadily, blandly from beneath shadowed bangs, although that seemingly harmless smile tugs at the corner of L's sugar-frosted lips again, and Raito knows that slight quirk veils a thousand deductions that no one else has ever noticed expect for him.

Then again, previously, most of those implications had been in some way constantly entwined with him—_whether as Kira or as Yagami Raito, primary suspect_—and at present all of those clandestine meanings are calculatedly meant for him. For him to dissect. To discover. To solve. Because L knows—_is one-hundred percent positive_—that Raito is Kira, and Raito instinctively knows that he and L are the sole people (ghosts? spirits?) in this drab, lifeless landscape of utter nothingness.

"Yes, although our—"

"—Sense of justice differs," Raito concludes annoyed by the fact they had this conversation numerous times prior when they were alive. Although he will never admit this aloud, Raito clearly remembers all the conversations with L he has had, and he finds the redundancy tedious. "That does not answer my question."

Mouth full of pink swirls of saccharine goodness, L smiles brightly and bluntly says, "Mine won, don't you agree, Yagami-kun?"

With an savage snarl, Raito dives wildly at L once more, this time with the vicious intent to claw out L's laughing eyes with his bare hands, smash L's pretty little head until his brains splatter across the grayness giving it a little color, a bloody, vivid crimson shade.

Expecting it, L smoothly dodges and effectively pins Raito to the invisible barrier as he stumbles and slips.

No matter how much he thrashes, bloodstained hands scraping frantically at scruffy faded jeans, Raito is unable to budge and realizes this position is infuriatingly familiar. Even though slim and wiry, ostensibly all gangly limbs and bloodless-white skin, L has the necessary strength to hold down Raito, bony knees digging painfully into Raito's hips.

L leans down nearly nose to nose with Raito, their breath—_L's sweet and somewhat salty with blood and cheescake, Raito's a mixture of copper and mint_—mingles, small puffs of air that hover pointlessly between them, sticking to eachother's icy skin like dried sweat. That damned smile is so close and Raito wants to rip it off L's fucking face so _fucking _much.

A plump bead of blood slides off the side of L's face and mutely drops onto Raito's cheek, seeming to fizz fitfully with a peculiar flaming heat _(since they are both as cold as their lifeless bodies shoved into a morgue's freezer) _where it hits the skin, and Raito flinches, revolted.

As L's icy lips brush against Raito's skin, following the defined curve of his cheekbone, Raito can feel the wry, triumphant smile they form, and he fervently twists in L's grip, teeth gnashing, gritting, like a caged animal.

"We are both sore losers, _Kira_," L purrs against Raito's strangely colorless, stone cold skin—_but they're dead so that's not so unusual, is it?_—and as that name resonates sardonically in his whirring mind like the pendulum of a clock _(counting down the minutes of his life, but he is dead, so it doesn't really matter, does it?)_,Raito decides that perhaps he shouldn't have goaded L to call him by it.

Then L is back to his original position, thumb between his teeth, crooked smile almost docile if it not so artfully unnerving, and he cocks his head slightly, shaggy black hair falling in weightless wisps across his hollow, black-rimmed eyes.

Shoulders rigid with ice blood once more, Raito slowly, carefully stands and meticulously straightens out to his rumpled suit _(the one in which he so pathetically died). _The minuscule sounds of the fragile bones in his marble white hands splitting and cracking as he runs them through to his dusty brown hair seem to echo deafeningly, emptily in Raito's ears. His eyes are frosty with a restrained inferno burning persistently beneath as he coolly meets L's misleadingly angelic gaze.

It's a futile attempt at regaining some of his self-respect and composure, and they both know it, but for two entirely different reasons, neither point this out.

"Kira wants to know why I'm here," L states, watching him absorbedly with those death-rimmed eyes like he did when he was alive, quirk of a smile conveying volumes that don't need to be verbalized. "I was waiting for someone, Yagami-kun."

Raito scowls, his razor glare unwavering _(yet when dead it seems to lose some of the sharpness, he crossly observes like a petulant child)_, and retorts, "I believe you've lost some of your brain cells while wasting away in this wretched place, L."

Undoubtedly, it's not the best of comebacks and glaringly hypocritical, as at present all that Raito _(Kira, God, whisper softly hysterical voices at the back of his mind, and the cage is broken but the rampant narcissus-born demon, though neither tamed nor even resigned, is found worthless) _has left is this dreary gray void of infinite nonexistence and the genius detective who beat him—_L_.

Raito absolutely despises L with his entire existence, and it's all rather senseless, and he absolutely loathes that as well.

L merely smiles his queer, knowing smile, nonchalantly retrieves his tossed-aside fork, awkwardly holding it between two fingers as always, and offers the glinting silver tines coated lusciously with sweet swirls of light pink and creamy white to Raito.

"Are you sure you would not like a bite, Yagami-kun?"

Even though he scowls witheringly, pretty mouth twisting into an ugly snarl, and irately turns away from the proffered hand and damnable _(almost innocent) _eyes Raito does not leave L's side.

_(where does he have to go, after all? who did he expect to greet him? the thousands, millions he killed on his vainglorious path to divinity, to Godhood? his worthless, long dismissed, forgotten father? now that's amusing__—__where does he have to go in death, in nothingness?)_

Even in death, Raito will not admit defeat.

_– Owari –_

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End Notes: So what'd you think? Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome!

Ja ne!

– scelerus animus o.O


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